Book Review: The Franchise Affair

The Franchise Affair
Josephine Tey
Mystery

[WARNING: Contrary to my usual practice, this review contains spoilers.]

Josephine Tey isn't as widely known as some other Golden-Age mystery writers, but her reputation among the cognoscenti is very high. The Daughter of Time and Brat Farrar and Miss Pym Disposes are all considered classics--and rightly so.

The Franchise Affair, regrettably, is nowhere near that quality. At best, it's aged poorly. Tey's virtues as a writer--characterization, in particular--are present, but they're eclipsed by a pervasive and quite nasty snobbery.

The story is a rather simple one. Robert Blair, a middle-aged lawyer with a settled life and no great passion, is called to assist one Marion Sharpe, who's been accused of kidnapping and beating a teenager named Betty Kane. In the process of finding out the truth, Blair accidentally falls in love with Marion, to his own mild confusion (this, by the way, is by far the best aspect of the book).

This being a mystery, it should surprise nobody that the heroine is innocent. What's rather disgusting is how Tey displays her class prejudices. Blair believes Marion at once because, basically, she's part of his social class--and according to Tey he's right to do so. In Tey's world, Our Sort of People are simply better than the common folk (who are all right as long as they Know Their Place). Our Sort of People can make pronouncements to the effect that you can always tell a criminal by the set of his eyes, or indeed that you can tell someone's character by the color of their eyes, and of course they're correct, because Our Sort of People just know these things. Old Colonel Whittaker pronounces Betty Kane a liar because she reminds him of this lance-corporal (not an officer, obviously!) he knew in India who was a Rank Bad Hat. Robert Blair knows that a certain witness is a liar because of, I kid you not, "the vulgar perfection of her teeth." Blair, indeed, expresses a repellent desire not merely to prove his client innocent, but to actually make Betty Kane suffer--because, I suppose, she's No Better Than She Should Be. It's all down to Breeding, you see, combined with mollycoddling the Criminal Elements among the lower classes. 

Frankly, by the middle of the book I was positively rooting for Marion Sharpe to be found guilty and sent to prison. Of course, that doesn't happen, nor is there any real suspense that it might happen (because Marion Sharp is Our Sort of People, while Betty Kane is ex hypothesi a Nasty Piece of Work). I could maybe forgive the unpleasant attitudes if the plot were a real corker, but in fact Robert Blair does absolutely nothing effective, there are no surprises or twists, and the conclusive evidence is delivered out of the blue by a random hotel owner who happened to see Betty Kane's picture in the newspaper.

Now, class prejudice in older fiction (and non-fiction) is hardly news. This particular iteration expresses the anxiety of the British upper-middle classes at losing of their privileges after World War II. That fear is perhaps the difference between forgivable and not. I'm strongly reminded of the frenzy of certain insecure males about the #MeToo movement, who are convinced that Conniving Women will be coming out of the woodwork to Threaten Their Masculinity with malicious and unfounded accusations. That's Tey's perspective the lower classes. 

By comparison, the snobbery found in Christie and (especially) Sayers is positively benign. Sayers certainly maintains the distinction between Our Sort of People and the rest, but the rest aren't considered to be inherently vicious and threatening and Other; indeed, when she's not being comic, she allows them their own kind of dignity, as with the Thodays in The Nine Tailors or the professional dancer Antoine in Have His Carcase.

Not recommended.